Smoking devices have been proposed through the years as improvements upon, or alternatives to, smoking products that require combusting tobacco for use. Many of those devices purportedly have been designed to provide the sensations associated with cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking, but without delivering considerable quantities of incomplete combustion and pyrolysis products that result from the burning of tobacco.
To this end, there have been proposed smoking products, flavor generators, and medicinal inhalers that utilize electrical energy to vaporize or heat a volatile material, or attempt to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking without burning tobacco to a significant degree. See, for example, the various alternative smoking articles, aerosol delivery devices and heat generating sources set forth in the background art described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,881,737 to Collett et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,726,320 to Robinson et al., U.S. Pat. App. Pub. Nos. 2013/0255702 to Griffith, Jr. et al.; 2014/0000638 to Sebastian et al.; and 2014/0096781 to Sears et al., which are incorporated herein by reference.
Of these smoking products, flavor generators, and medicinal inhalers that employ electrical energy to produce heat for smoke or aerosol formation, a wick and coil arrangement is often utilized in conjunction with an electrical power source, such as a battery. More particularly, in this arrangement, the coil is in direct contact with the wick and acts as a heating element. The coil is configured to conduct electrical current from the battery, and heat, by direct contact, a limited quantity of aerosol precursor composition absorbed by the wick. However, a wick and coil arrangement may cause thermal degradation of the aerosol precursor composition since direct heating may result in uneven heating of the aerosol precursor composition.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an aerosol delivery device that employs heat produced by an external energy source to heat an aerosol precursor composition to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking, which preferably does so without direct contact with or thermal degradation of the aerosol precursor composition, in order to prolong the service life of the device and deliver a more consistent aerosol.